ReviewBruce Lee’s daughter Shannon turns her martial arts icon father’s ideas into a self-help guide in Be Water, My Friend

Shannon Lee’s book takes aphorisms and observations from her father’s handwritten notebooks and broadens them out to address modern living

It is very good when it talks about the philosophy behind Lee’s martial arts system jeet kune do, but less so when it tries to apply it to modern life

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Bruce Lee in Game of Death (1978). Photo: Concord Productions/Columbia Pictures/Golden Harvest

Published: 2:30am, 29 Oct 2020Updated: 9:08pm, 29 Oct 2020

Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee, by Shannon Lee, pub. Barnes & Noble. 3/5 stars

Over the last few years there has been a move to elevate Bruce Lee from martial arts icon to philosopher. That is probably an exaggeration, although Lee was certainly a thoughtful and well-read young man – he possessed a library of around 2,500 books, including philosophical works by Thomas Aquinas, David Hume and René Descartes.

Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee is a tenderly written book by his daughter Shannon Lee, who is also the president of the Bruce Lee Foundation, that takes sections from Lee’s handwritten notebooks – mainly aphorisms and observations – and broadens them out into a self-help guide for modern living.

The book is very good when it talks about the philosophy behind Lee’s martial arts system jeet kune do – his thoughts on the rigidity of fighting styles mean that he could never describe his system as a “style” – but less successful when it tries to apply his ideas to everyday life.

Lee took a course in Western philosophy and a course in Chinese philosophy while a student at the University of Washington, and this gave him the methodology to apply critical thinking to martial arts. As Shannon points out in her book, the core of his ideas lay in the idea that the traditions behind martial arts styles like wing chun, in which he had trained, had given them a rigidity that handicapped their use in combat situations.

Shannon Lee hopes the new book can be used as a self-help guide for modern living. Photo: Shutterstock/Andrew Walker

“The classical mess” as Lee described it, meant that martial artists had become so concerned with upholding tradition that they were not open to new ideas, even if those new ideas would make their style more effective. This approach even ran into the way the schools were organised, and Lee was criticised for teaching non-Chinese students, as tradition mandated that the secrets of kung fu should only be passed on to Chinese pupils.